It isn't a matter of Graph Search suffering from a lack of vision or that it isn't the big technical achievement that it's billed as (it is by the way), it's that for Facebook mobile is tomorrow.

It isn't a matter of Graph Search suffering from a lack of vision or that it isn't the big technical achievement that it's billed as (it is by the way), it's that for Facebook mobile is tomorrow. They even said as much during their presentation. And if the year were 2010 or earlier that way of thinking might be reasonable, but it's 2013 and the mobile is today. Not only is mobile today, mobile is it. There is nothing else; if you're not a mobile first company then you aren't a competitive company plain and simple.

I understand that it's hard and time consuming to build a product and that at times there is a desire to do a slow rollout as to not absolutely kill your servers and to hopefully catch some bugs in the process. Facebook decided to release Graph Search to desktop users first with a mobile version coming some time in the future. Regardless of whether it's a product people actually want the mobile version should clearly have been the first to see release if not at the same time. It's a search, recommendation, and friend list product, which are things that have their greatest consumer value on mobile. If I'm looking for a place to eat and remember my friend suggesting a place they went to, I am not going to get on my computer, log in to Facebook, and then search. I'm going to either text or call my friend; that means use my phone. If I know that Facebook can provide me that information immediately on my phone without having to see if my friend picks up or wait for his response text then I am going to use that. It's about putting the information where I want to access it not just that it is accessible.

This is where Facebook failed. I hear some bitching about Graph Search as if it is sign of them playing catchup, but just a couple years ago we all eagerly awaited a search product from them. Graph Search is interesting and is an obvious inclusion into Facebook, but what is needed is a major overhaul of what Facebook is and how we use it. Such a design shift has been rumored to be coming soon to mobile along with further timeline-ification of the desktop site. I once wrote that Timeline was Facebook's big design forward push to creating an emotional attachment with user a la Apple, but Graph Search and "mobile tomorrow" thinking show that Facebook heading down the Microsoft path: universally accepted yet undesirable.

I have had both the luxury and shame of never having worked for a software company, but there is one truth about the software industry (and most industry) that everyone eventually learns: culture is key.

I have had both the luxury and shame of never having worked for a software company, but there is one truth about the software industry (and most industry) that everyone eventually learns: culture is key.

It’s all about culture and that is what was at the center of the Forstall and Sinofsky departures. It’s not that either of them were bad at their job, in fact they should both be praised for their accomplishments. Both made their respective OSes the powerhouses that they are today, but they just don’t fit anymore.

In the case of Apple, Forstall was a mini tyrant playing Jobs and it served him well for years. After all, Apple was built on the back of a tyrant, the late Steve Jobs, but that was no longer how Apple worked. Apple has long since transitioned into a company that depends on a team that can execute together. That’s why more and more we saw Jobs bring the heads of different departments to present new products; it was all to transition into a new culture that could exist without Jobs. Forstall’s removal was just a last minute correction.

In the case of Microsoft, Sinofsky owned the Windows product, but cared very little for anything else. Ever wondered why so many Microsoft product seemed disjointed and confused? It’s not by accident, Microsoft was a famously silo’d company structure where product would get developed almost in a vacuum. They are moving away from that with Windows 8, Windows Phone 8, and Xbox; trying to tie all their platforms and services into one seamless experience across all devices. There is no place for a man unwilling to look beyond self-erected walls of pride in the new Microsoft (except, of course, for Ballmer, but that’s a story for another day).

It doesn’t matter the size of the company or even the type of company, fostering a strong sense of culture makes for happier, harder-working employees and a stronger company.

This is very shocking to me. I knew a lot of popular apps are just HTML5 app masquerading as native, but I would never have though that such a high percentage would actively prefer it. I can understand using it due to the immense familiarity with the web technologies over Objective-C or Java, but I would never recommend it.

This is very shocking to me. I knew a lot of popular apps are just HTML5 app masquerading as native, but I would never have though that such a high percentage would actively prefer it. I can understand using it due to the immense familiarity with the web technologies over Objective-C or Java, but I would never recommend it.

The huge problem is that HTML 5 kind of sucks. Don’t misunderstand me, I love it! I am, after all, a web developer, but I know the limitations. Native just gives better performance and it is painfully noticeable. Look no further than when Facebook switches to fully native on iOS. The difference performance is like night and day. Need a more recent example? Tumblr just updated its iOS offering to fully native today as well and it’s gorgeous and blazing fast. HTML 5 is not there yet, it will eventually get there, though, I’m sure.

I understand, we developers are lazy assholes, but we can be bothered to both use the best tools for a given job and to impress. I’m not a mobile app developer and probably wont be, but should I try my hand at it you can be assured its going to be a dive into Objective-C and I already know Java if I felt like going the Android route. If you’re going to use HTML 5, then do what I do and make a mobile web app. Want more of a wow factor? Try going fully responsive like Polygon or Information Architects or the upcoming profile pages for ShopSWS’s employees. There are plenty of tools out there than can help make you web app feel much more like a native app: tools like Ratchet and Scrollability.

Disney bought Lucasfilm and with it Star Wars. Disney wasted no time in announcing that Star Wars episode 7 would come out in 2015. If you’re like me then this is just about the worst news imaginable. Star Wars, the original trilogy, was such a triumph while all other additions to the universe have ranged from middling crap to abysmally horrible.

Disney bought Lucasfilm and with it Star Wars. Disney wasted no time in announcing that Star Wars episode 7 would come out in 2015. If you’re like me then this is just about the worst news imaginable. Star Wars, the original trilogy, was such a triumph while all other additions to the universe have ranged from middling crap to abysmally horrible. The franchise has lost it’s luster long ago… In a galaxy fa—NO, not doing that—and I just want it to be allowed to die with the little bit of dignity it has left. The problem is that it still makes money and will continue to do so because we’re all a bunch of masochistic assholes. You, me, all of us. We’ll bitch and moan all the way into 2015 about episode 7, but there we’ll be at the midnight showing dropping $10 to have our childhood raped all over again. So it’s no surprise Disney is making another Star Wars. No matter what it is we’ll keep eating up whatever lightsaber-smattered slop they serve us while making comments like, “at least Lucas won’t be directly involved in this one.” Seriously though, guys, at least Lucas won’t be directly involved in this one.

Scott Forstall has been let go from apple and while I’ll miss his eyes bugging out during his many hyperbolic monologues it seems that Apple is glad to be rid of him.

Scott Forstall has been let go from apple and while I’ll miss his eyes bugging out during his many hyperbolic monologues it seems that Apple is glad to be rid of him.

“Forstall was effectively a component of friction in Apple’s therwise very collaborative senior management structure.”

Charlie Wolf, an analyst at Needham & Co.

Scott Forstall was the man behind iOS and a champion for skeumorphic design. With his departing, Jony Ive will be taking over Human Interface which means that there is a future for iOS where skeumorphism is just a distant memory from yesteryear. I’m very curious to see where Jony will take iOS in the future and to see how long until his influence will be felt. Whatever it is, finally there will software worthy of gorgeous hardware Apple is known for.

It has often seemed like it would be battle between Forstall and Ive as heir apparent to Jobs; Ive with his exacting designs and demand for physical perfection and Forstall with his strict and far reaching management style. For now it seems that Ive has won and that’s good news. Apple is a company built on the back of a visionary. Tim Cook is a great CEO and will undoubtedly ensure the continuance of Apple’s dominance in mobile and growth in laptops/desktops, but he is no visionary. He recognizes that and doesn’t pretend to be and that’s why he needs someone like Ive to be in control of both hardware and software. Sure, some might say that he doesn’t know software, well it’s not like Forstall knew hardware, but Ive knows human interaction. What is more human than holding something, Ive understands this and that is why every new iteration of iPhone, iPad, iPod and Mac is a triumph to behold and to touch. This skill can and will translate to software. Faux leather is just as bad in real life as it is in software.

Personally I would love to see the simple, clean minimalism from the new iTunes throughout iOS or even to see how Loren Brichter might tackle the the iOS home screen. Let the iOS 7 rumors flow!

Circa is a news reader, but quite unlike most that you have seen. Circa doesn’t just sort, collect, and display news articles from various sources online, no, there is a full editorial staff that collects stories, sifts through them, pulls out the most important details and then gives the the short-short version.

Today a new app and service called Circa was released. Circa is a news reader, but quite unlike most that you have seen. Circa doesn’t just sort, collect, and display news articles from various sources online, no, there is a full editorial staff that collects stories, sifts through them, pulls out the most important details and then gives the the short-short version. The idea being that when you’ve got a couple minutes to spare, rather than load up Angry Birds, you could digest a few bit-sized stories and actually gain some information.

It’s a wonderful idea and one that could hold a lot of promise. The big problem is that I have no trust in the editorial staff and at the end of the day the news, sadly, isn’t about merely the facts, but more the trust/faith in their source. I suspect, and time will tell, that Circa will lean left of center which suits me just fine, but still I wonder what’s getting left on the editors’ cutting floor. The news has so much nuance; what was said, what was meant, and how it was delivered are all equally important and separate facets of any story and Circa is incapable (presently) of delivering all 3 while also make the news “stackable”. So when it’s all said and done, I’ll still have to save articles to Pocket for when I get home and have time to sit at my computer. Still, it will be interesting to see how Circa grows and evolves as it is an extremely well-backed venture. I’ll be using this as my primary (read non-tech news related) source of news for the next couple weeks and see things go and make a follow up post.

Circa

If you've never played Dead Space then shame on you. It's a terrifically fantastic game, especially the second one. Sure, there are some cheap jump scares like you would find in any survival horror, but the game can be horrific with a mere light flicker and an ominous sound that has just a bit too much treble to not be something lurking in the shadows.

If you've never played Dead Space then shame on you. It's a terrifically fantastic game, especially the second one. Sure, there are some cheap jump scares like you would find in any survival horror, but the game can be horrific with a mere light flicker and an ominous sound that has just a bit too much treble to not be something lurking in the shadows. It's a real experience and there are definitely scenes that I could have done without ever seeing in my lifetime. But it's not all horrors, there is some spectacular cinematic action that blows the mind, puts it back together and blows it again.

The dead space series stars an engineer named Isaac Clarke that has been driven mad by an alien monolith known as the marker. If being driven mad wasn't bad enough the marker also has a nasty habit of spawning a viral alien life form that lives only to kill, infect, and mutate. It's classic sci-fi alien action. Isaac, driven by madness and revenge for his dead girlfriend whose memory haunts him, seeks out the marker to destroy it. This tends to put him in a series of shit situations.

The most notable of which takes place in the second game where we find Isaac doing a space walk above Jupiter's moon, Titan, fixing a solar array to deliver power back to the moon base when he gets a distress call from his comrades that they are being overwhelmed by monsters and urgently need him. Being miles above the surface of the moon how is Isaac to get to his friends in time?

He fucking launched himself at the moon with a rocket! Head first into a moon with a rocket strapped to him! As if that wasn't badass enough he dodges a shit ton of space debry, even flying through some of it. Then he crashes head first into the roof of the moon base and tops it all off with an Ironman style landing. Then he just continues on to his friends like it was nothing! Like he does that shit everyday! It's like, "oh, hello Isaac, how was your day at work?" "You know, the same old routine, fixed some satellites, had a light lunch, talked with Debra from accounting a bit, oh and I FELL TO THE FUCKING MOON!"

Vampires. These days that word tends to evoke thoughts of glitter, bad acting, wild hair, and existential crises, but before Robert Pattinson shimmered his way into Kristen Stewarts pants and the realm of pop culture vampires were a creature to be feared.

Vampires. These days that word tends to evoke thoughts of glitter, bad acting, wild hair, and existential crises, but before Robert Pattinson shimmered his way into Kristen Stewarts pants and the realm of pop culture vampires were a creature to be feared. They were dark and mysterious beings that fed on the blood of humans. They were something to be intrigued by, but always something that needed to be killed, preferably via a stake through the heart. And while vampires are pretty much ruined for movies, True Blood, and movies, Twilight, they have remained relatively untouched in gaming, thankfully. You see gamers get it, vampires just straight up need to be killed. There's a whole series based on that premise. I am, of course, talking about Castlevania.

Castlevania, as you probably know, is about the eternal struggle between the vampire-hunter family the Belmonts and Dracula. Nearly each game ends with you killing Dracula, typically by whipping him in the face and dick. However, one Belmont apparently thought genital whippings were beneath him and decided to step up his game. That brings me to the focus of this first installment of Epic Badassery: Gabriel Belmont.

Gabriel doesn't just kill a vampire in Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, no he gets brutal with his killings and none more so than his encounter with Carmilla, queen of the vampires. Check out the video below to see how he ends her.

HE FUCKING STABBED THAT DRACULA BITCH WITH A BUILDING! WITH A FUCKING BUILDING! What kind of a monster man is he? He pulled a flying bat, at least 300lbs, from the sky down unto a building and then he kept pulling and BROKE THE FUCKING BUILDING! Gabriel Belmont, you sir are one epic badass and I cannot wait to see the crazy shit that'll go down in Lords of Shadow 2.

The Image on the left is supposedly a leaked image of the new Sparrow for iOS app. The Image on the right is of a concept I drew up almost 2 years ago and sent to Scott Forstall.

The Image on the left is supposedly a leaked image of the new Sparrow for iOS app. The Image on the right is of a concept I drew up almost 2 years ago and sent to Scott Forstall.

If this is real, then it is nice to see that I wasn’t totally insane when I thought a Tweetie style implementation of Mail would be awesome. Of course I should have expected this from Sparrow, after all they seem to admire Loren Brichter’s work as much as I do.

Here is my original posting on the matter:

One of the most often used and underwhelming apps on the iPhone is the Mail app. Sure they added a unified inbox with

The Issues:

1. Inability to star/flag emails
2. Trash, sent, and labels are hard to reach
3. General clunkiness in the UI

These are the three biggest issue, I believe, with Mail right now. I think my re-imagining of Mail will address if not fix the first two, the last is a little subjective. While thikning about this I looked to other apps out there that are known for their excellent design; the one that inspired me the most was Twitter for iPhone of former Tweetie fame. In fact I would even say that I stole most of the ideas presented in Twitter because they just worked so well. So lets take a look at what a Tweetie inspired Mail would look like.

So we have a black navigation bar at the bottom so we can quickly switch between inbox, sent, starred, trashed, and even label which would be found in More. Of course like all other apps that implement this bar the items presented on the home screen can be switched out to customize for your own needs. Each email can be flicked to give quick access to common controls because you shouldn’t always have to open an email to act on it and often we don’t need to. So we can now quickly reply, forward, label, star, trash, and get attachments without even opening the full email. To get the most current emails, you just simply pull the list down to reload like in Tweetie. With Push email it isn’t very common to manually refresh your emails so I don’t think it warranted it own button on the screen, so a gesture seemed more than adequate. And lastly to switch between email accounts just tap the “All Inboxes” at the top to bring up a list of your accounts and just tap the one you want. There are no changes to the screens when reading an email or composing one, I think those are mostly just fine as is. Maybe a slight tweak in reading to account for starring.

I think this is vastly superior to the existing Mail app and would be greatly appreciated by those who, like myself, are constantly getting email. Let me know what you think in the comments.

Google is smart. Very smart. They have without a doubt some of the best engineers in the world. They do the hard work that makes so much of modern technology seem like something out of a science fiction novel. Whatever they tackle, they dominate… for the most part.

Google is smart. Very smart. They have without a doubt some of the best engineers in the world. They do the hard work that makes so much of modern technology seem like something out of a science fiction novel. Whatever they tackle, they dominate… for the most part.

Before Google, search was ruled by the likes of Yahoo!, Lycos, and Alta-Vista; the early years of the public modern internet were a very dark and grim place. Then the once and future search giant came and the world never looked back. The same can be said for email with Google’s GMail service. Sure, it isn’t actually the top dog when you look at market share, but to the tech savvy there is no other comparable option. Google didn’t stop there though, they continued to revolutionize what the internet can do for you: Maps, Navigation, Places, Voice Search, Images, News, RSS, Blogs, Video(YouTube), and so on. Google quickly became the go to place for anything online, that is until Social Networks got on the scene. Blogs were among the first sites promoting the idea of social. Sure there were BBS and Forums before then, but social as its understood and implemented online today is much different from those models. Blogs, as popular as they were and still are, were not the right direction and so sites like Friendster and MySpace were developed. Places where a user would have a profile viewable by friends and the ability to display and discuss similar interests with people in a very fast paced manner. Facebook would eventually become the biggest of all networks, coming in at about 600+ million users. Not long after Facebook, Twitter was created and took the best parts of social, sharing and communicating with friends, and combined it with the best part of blogs, updates and news. These two companies arguably dominate social on the internet and for the first time Google was not in the limelight.

Like I said at the beginning, Google is really smart. No one will deny that, but Google is socially awkward. Like that nerdy kid in class, he is smart and even kind of cool when you get to know him, but he just can’t help but put his foot in his mouth around a large group. For proof of this we need not look any further than Google’s previous attempts at social.

Orkut, possibly the first of Google’s social networks. It is rarely even talked about and is often never mentioned as it didn’t get any attention in the USA and Google never really took the time to advertise it. They tried to take on Twitter, which is taking over realtime search and news, a category that Google would understandably want to be in, with Google Buzz. Buzz what met with the utmost of hate by all GMail users when the service got forced on them and as it stands today I can think of only one person who uses it. Wave is another service that was set to reinvent email, chat, and document collaboration, but what abandoned before it even got out of beta. Those were novel attempts, but what Google needed to do was take a shot at Facebook if it really wanted to stake a claim on the social pie. And that is exactly what they did with Google+.

Google+ is in many ways a reskin of the basic Facebook experience with a few interesting ideas excellently executed. People often complain about privacy controlls on Facebook, though I find that ridiculous as its stupidly easy to adjust and always has been, so Google created Circles to control your groups of friends and what content gets shared with whom. Social networks are social in so far as they allow you to communicate with one person at a time, so Google made Hangouts to make quick groupings of friends to communicate in a chatroom or video call. And they took the Twitter model in that friendships are not strictly bi-directional. All very good ideas, but the the entire experience is unfortunately hollow. It isn’t even a matter or the product being in beta and not a lot of people using it, it just doesn’t feel good enough. When you compare it to Facebook it feel just like a me too type of deal. Especially now that Facebook has made it easier to create group chats and video calls along with a major revamp of the their messaging platform. When Facebook was made it was something new and innovative; the wall, likes, apps, everything, it was all new and different. There is nothing all that new about Google+.

Google, thankfully, hasn’t let their interest in social interfere with their other core services. I understand the power of being able to tap into a person’s “social graph” to give me relevant personalized results, but it doesn’t have to mean I have to rebuild my entire online identity on a service that seems like it will inevitably fail to do so. Bing, yes I am going to reference Bing as doing something right, understands this and integrates Facebook likes into its search results to show restaurants in line with what your friends like. This is a simplistic feature, but it could be expanded out to include your music, movie, book, and topics tastes.

Google needs to stop trying to go social, they just don’t have the culture for it. There is nothing wrong with that and it’s admirable that they are trying to reinvent themselves. That’s very hard to do, but there is no shame and backing off for right now on this. Google+ isn’t the answer. All their other improvements that came along with this launch are amazing! The new UI and design are a long time coming and most welcome.

That said, I don’t think Facebook and Twitter are the end all be all of social, there is definitely room for others to get a piece of the pie or even replace an existing platform, but whatever that service is, it isn’t anything like Google+, that is to say, it isn’t anything like Facebook or Twitter.